Thursday: Almost done with this stage of the trip.

Which is a bit sad, as having two weeks to literally do as little as possible has been a good relief after a month and a half of constant panic about moving.  Still, this can't go on forever.  I need to finish the move, and find an apartment, and buy furniture, and start going to work again.

But, obviously, the first thing I need to do is fly to San Francisco, since that's in completely the opposite direction of where I'm moving.

This got deleted, and I forgot what the caption was.  This is the new computer I had delivered today.  It is tiny and cool.

A dual core, 2.1Ghz Celeron, with 2GB ram, and 32GB MMC hard drive.  So, basically my cheap-o laptop in a desktop format.  This should be powerful enough to function as the firewall to keep the world outside of my local net.  I still will need to sort out how to get the wifi router to let the inside hosts be contacted, but that shouldn't be too bad.

Also, can we talk about how this took two days to get to me from Hong Kong, is more powerful than 90% of all computers I've ever owned, uses at most 36W of power, is silent due to not having a fan or spinning disk, and correctly installed Ubuntu in about twenty minutes without any errors?  Technology has reached the "I'll throw $150 at this problem and it's solved."

Plus this thing is like the size of a bagel.  It even has an attachment plate in the package so you can bolt it onto the back of most televisions to get it out of the way.

• They're all grifters.  Incompetent, sociopathic grifters.
• Republicans don't want everyone to die.  Just the poor and infirm.  You know, just like the Bible always told the evangelicals.
• John Block, publisher of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is a bag of shit.
• So I was watching this incredibly stupid show about ufos with my parents, and it occurred to me that our telescope looked at ~125 pointings a night for like nine years, with maybe an 20% weather penalty.  Assume all UFOs are brighter than these objects, so brighter than say 14th magnitude.  Given the field of view, and the repeated observations, and this brightness (about saturation on most exposures), we should have observed at least 60 unknown objects that saturate the camera.  I assume everyone can draw the obvious conclusion.